Further Tests of the Utility of Integrated Speed-Accuracy Measures in Task Switching

Speed and accuracy of performance are central to many theoretical accounts of cognitive processing. In recent years, several integrated performance measures have been proposed. A comparative study of the available measures [Vandierendonck, A. (2017). A comparison of methods to combine speed and accuracy measures of performance: A rejoinder on the binning procedure. Behavior Research Methods, 49, 653–673. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-016-0721-5] concluded that three of the measures, namely inverse efficiency score, rate correct score, and linear integrated speed-accuracy score achieved a balanced integration of speed and accuracy. As a follow-up on that study, these three measures were examined in data analyses from 13 (published and unpublished) experiments in the context of task switching. The correlations of the effect sizes in these integrated scores with the effect sizes obtained in latency and accuracy were high, but varied across the three integrated measures. The efficiency to detect effects supported by the speed and accuracy data was examined by means of signal detection analyses. The three measures efficiently detected effects present in either speed or accuracy, but the rate correct score was less efficient than the other two measures and it signalled a larger number of strong effects unsupported by the speed and accuracy data. It is concluded that while the rate correct score is better avoided, and the usage of the inverse efficiency score should be restricted to data with low overall error rates, the linear integrated speed-accuracy score proves to be valid.